Augmented Identity App Helps You Identify Strangers on the Street

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-02/augmented-identity-app-helps-you-identify-friend-perfect-strangers

Augmented Identity App Helps You Identify Strangers on the Street

By Clay Dillow Posted 02.23.2010 at 3:44 pm 11 Comments

Recognizr The Astonishing Tribe

By this point, we're all familiar with augmented reality, but Swedish mobile
software firm The Astonishing Tribe is taking information overload to the
next logical step: augmented identity. Mashing up face recognition
technology, computer vision, cloud computing, and augmented reality with the
complex digital lives many of us lead on the Internet, TAT has created an app
that allows you to gather information on a person and their social networking
life simply by pointing your camera phone at their face.

Dubbed Recognizr, the app essentially works like this: the user points the
camera at a person across the room. Face recognition software creates a 3-D
model of the person's mug and sends it across a server where it's matched
with an identity in the database. A cloud server conducts the facial
recognition since and sends back the subject's name as well as links to any
social networking sites the person has provided access to.

Related Articles

	Augmented Reality Headsets to Help ISS Astronauts

	Augmented Reality Subway Finder iPhone App Is Awesome

	Find Your Twitter Friends In Real Life With an Augmented Reality
iPhone App

Tags

Technology, Clay Dillow, apps, augmented identity, augmented reality, cell
phones, facial recognition, mobile apps, social networking

The software even takes note of the position of the person's head within your
field of view, popping up icon links to the subject's social sites around his
or her head without obscuring the strikingly lovely features that caught your
attention in the first place.

Given the vast catalog of photos already posted to more social corners of the
Web like Twitter and Facebook, the software opens up our social networks to
some unique possibilities. And though it may seem counter-intuitive, the face
recognition aspect of this particular brand of AR apparently works better
than some other apps that simply gather information on places or objects,
because its easy for the software to figure out exactly what you want to
search for -- the human face (as opposed to a particular building on a block
with many other buildings, edifices, and other objects).

Of course, where social networks go, advertisers and other more invasive data
mining schemes are sure to follow. But privacy geeks can take a pre-emptive
pipe-down; you have to opt into the service and upload a photo and profile in
order to be ID'd by the system. The recognition algorithms are compatible
with the iPhone as well as newer Android phones, though it seems the current
demo only runs on phones with at least a five-megapixel camera and the
Android OS.